Early call centers were structured around handling voice calls that may have been inbound, outbound, or combination of both. While voice calls are a common way of engaging remote parties, modern call centers now handle many other types of communication channels. For instance, many call centers can support various data oriented channels (i.e., non-voice channels) such as email, short messaging service texts (SMS texts), multimedia messaging service texts (MMS texts), social media, fax, and web-based chat. Accordingly, many call centers managing these additional channels have become to be referred to as “contact centers” to reflect that they support many different modes of engaging remote parties, as opposed to only handling voice calls.
In the past, agents who were employed in a call center that only handled voice calls were only required to be able to converse with third parties over telephone calls in a clear, concise, and professional manner to provide a high quality of service to these third parties. However, as the number of channels of communication has increased over the years, agents are now required to possess a number of additional skills to be able to competently handle all the different channels of communication being utilized in a contact center environment. For instance, agents who engage in text-based channels of communication such as SMS text, MMS text, and Web chat with remote parties must also have competent typing, spelling, and grammatical skills. In addition, these agents must be able to convey needed information in written form to third parties that is clear, concise, and in a professional manner. Furthermore, these agents must be able to practice these skills in near real-time due to the nature of many text-based channels of communication and how frequently messages are exchanged between an agent and a remote party. Accordingly, many contact centers engage in training their agents to help them develop these needed skills.
A conventional approach to training agents that has been used in many contact centers is to have training staff (e.g., supervisors) review past communications with agents so that instances that occurred during the communications where improvement can be made are identified and discussed with the agents. For example, a supervisor may review text-based communications that were composed and sent by a particular agent with the agent to help him or her learn how to correctly handle certain information that is to be conveyed in these types of communications as well as how to correctly convey the information grammatically and professionally. However, the problem with using this conventional approach is that coaching is provided to the agents after the communications have been sent. That is to say, the agents are taught how to correct issues that occurred during the communications after the fact. As a result, the remote parties involved in these communications may receive a poor quality of service from the agents involved. In addition, agents may continue to make the same mistakes on multiple communications before they are made aware of the mistakes and are provided feedback on how to correct them.
Another conventional approach to training agents that has been used is to have training staff be involved in the communications as they are taking place between agents and remote parties so that the training staff can provide input to the agents in real-time as the agents interact with the remote parties. For example, a supervisor may serve as a third party and actively view the text messages or Web chat messages exchanged between an agent and a remote party as they take place and provide input to the agent during the exchange. This input may be provided so that the remote party involved in the exchange is also able to see the input as separate messages from the supervisor during the exchange (sometimes referred to as barging in on the communication) or may be provided so that only the agent, and not the remote party, is able to see the input. However, similar to the first approach, this approach again only provides coaching to the agent after the fact. That is to say, this approach only provides input from the supervisor to the agent after a message that triggers the input from the supervisor has been sent by an agent and viewed by the remote party. Accordingly, this approach does not provide the supervisor with an opportunity to edit/correct the message before it is viewed by the remote party. Furthermore, a supervisor's barging in after viewing an errant message to try and remedy the mistake made by the agent may appear intrusive and disruptive to the remote party.
Therefore, a need exists in the art to furnish an approach for providing timely feedback to agents involved in text-based communications with third parties and allows for the correction of messages before they are sent and viewed by a remote party. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.